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Overview

X-Engineering the Corporation: Reinventing Your Business in the Digital Age by James A. Champy

The walls between a company, its customers, and its suppliers-even between its competitors-are coming down. In a world of free-flowing information and products, X-Engineering the Corporation reveals a radical new vision of the corporation.

Instead of a collection of separate companies turning out goods and services, Champy shows us a web of interacting processes and people that includes every organization touched by a company's product. Gone are the old secrecy controls. In their place is a collaborative environment where people have all the information they need, ideas are shared, and businesses learn to:

Create Harmony. By getting more in tune with how its customers operate, Owens and Minor delivers medical products exactly when its customers want them-and reduces costs.

Be Transparent. Electronics manufacturing service company Solectron reveals to its customers the details of its processes-an innovation that keeps it competitive while speeding and streamlining production.

Understand the Role of Customers. EMC, the world's leading manufacturer of memory storage devices, talks with, listens to, and values customer "pull" more than ever before-and now defines its process "push" with pinpoint accuracy.

Continuously X-engineer. When PNC Bank used the full power of the Internet in every one of its divisions, its efficiency-and that of its customers-improved exponentially.

Inspiring and illuminating, this book uncovers the unlimited potential that imaginatively applied information technology offers corporations. X-Engineering the Corporation is a must-read: because change is the one thing all businesspeople must do well today.

About the Author: James Champy is chairman of Perot Systems consulting practice. His columns on management are published internationally. He is the coauthor of Reengineering the Corporation and The Arc of Ambition, as well as the author of Reengineering Management.

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Editorial Reviews

The first book that describes what companies must do to change how they operate and to leverage the real power of information technology...

Michael Dell

A breakthrough book...a must-read for executives who want to prosper in the networked economy.

Patrick J. McGovern

An important contribution to business strategy for the corporation in the twenty-first century...an invaluable resource for executives...

Judy C. Lewent

Jim Champy has done it again... promises to unleash a new revolution...to find powerful new ways of enhancing corporate performance. Harvard Business School

Nitin Nohria

Information Technology Meets Reengineering Now that you have reengineered your company and streamlined your processes for maximum efficiency, you are ready to rise to the next level with X-engineering. X-engineering uses technology-enabled processes to connect organizations with other businesses, and companies with customers to improve efficiency and create value for everyone involved.

Global competitive pressure drives this change, as well as the inefficiency and redundancy that exist in work relationships between organizations and with customers. The Internet and its technologies enable X-engineering, and it involves boundary crossing on a huge scale to create connections in a giant web of transactions. Almost ten years after writing Reengineering the Corporation with Michael Hammer and changing the way companies view efficiency and productivity, James Champy has returned with X-Engineering the Corporation - a more inclusive and wider stretching version of reengineering that has been redesigned to work in today's tough business climate.

The Birth of X-Engineering X-engineering began when Champy set out to untangle a giant financial mess: A Boston health maintenance organization (HMO) had found $100 million worth of previously unreported red ink on its books.

In an effort to regain control of its operations and finances, the HMO required drastic restructuring that would need to extend far beyond its walls and into many more aspects of the entire health care industry. Since the HMO was merely an intermediary that traded information with its partners, the entire network of organizations with which it worked would also need to be part ofthe reengineering process.

When reengineering was forced to cross the boundaries of many organizations and redesign the working relationships the HMO had with its members, employees, doctors, hospitals and insurers to change the way each of them added value to a patient's experience, X-engineering was born. This cross-organizational process change requires shifts in strategies, and extensive use of information technology (IT) and the Internet to get the job of reinventing an industry done.

Beyond IT With technological advances in communication at its core, X-engineering is the manifestation of the concept of the "virtual corporation." But, Champy writes, it cannot function on IT alone. It also requires the work of managers who can develop new business processes that cross organizational boundaries and share information with other companies and, eventually, the entire industry. By doing so, Champy explains that these new processes will "both dramatically improve the performance of companies and the value they deliver to customers." With the Internet available to share the lifeblood of vital information among disparate companies and their processes, X-engineering relies on the ability of new technology to gather, share and analyze information with speed and efficiency, and often, transparency.

Three Practices Champy explains that X-engineering responds to three questions:

How does a company need to change?

What are the benefits?

Whose collaboration is needed?

To find answers, a company must look at: its processes, which include all the things it does to create and sell goods and services; the business proposition it offers customers; and the extent of its participation with others in creating shared processes. Process (both internal and external), proposition and participation are the three practices that must be reinvented by X-engineering, and cross-organizational cooperation and change are necessary to make it work.

Why Soundview Likes This BookX-Engineering the Corporation is filled with the forward thinking that managers need to face an interconnected world where the Internet play a pivotal role in the way businesses function.

With pertinent examples from PNC Bank, Dell, Bank of America, Owens & Minor, and W.W. Grainger, Champy backs up his theories with real scenarios where companies have used them and succeeded through networked restructuring.

Champy offers the promise of performance improvement with carefully described, understandably portrayed ideas that are both innovative and practical. Nothing in his book is overwhelmingly complex or complicated, and his ability to transmit the information in a straightforward manner should ease their application.

By looking at the future of business with a sharp eye on better strategies for today's organizations, Champy takes the successes of re-engineering to the next level without missing a step along the way. Copyright (c) 2002 Soundview Executive Book Summaries